‘Jetflicks’ Pirate Site Programmer Sentenced to 1 Year in Prison

• The person who helped program ‘Jetflicks’ has received the minimum possible sentence in court.
• The judge handed over 12 months and three years of supervision with no fines.
• Six members of the pirate platform remain to be trialed by jury as they have not pleaded guilty yet.

Quite a while back, in August 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the arrest and charge of eight individuals who were linked to two popular copyright-infringing websites, namely ‘Jetflicks’ and ‘iStreamItAll.’ These were two of the biggest-size pirate sites in the U.S., offering hundreds of thousands of pirated TV shows and films to their visitors, actually maintaining a database that dwarfed those of Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime combined. A few months ago, the main operator of these sites, Darryl Julius Polo, heard his sentence (57 months in prison), and now, the programmer's time came.

Luis Angel Villarino, who has pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement since the time of his arrest in 2019, is now sentenced to 12 months in prison for his contributions to Jetflicks. Villarino, who is 40 years old now, will enter a status of supervised release for three years after completing the imprisonment phase of his sentence, indicative of how seriously the judiciary system treats the crime of technical support to platforms that foster copyright infringement.

The only thing that Villarino was spared from was the element of fines, but this trouble may come upon him in the future. This is noteworthy because the sentencing guidelines, including a fine ranging between $5,500 and $55,0000, but the judge chose not to impose even the minimum. Possibly, this is because Villarino pleaded guilty immediately and collaborated with the prosecution.

The rest of the Jetflicks team members (Kristopher Lee Dallmann, Douglas M. Courson, Felipe Garcia, Jared Edward Jaurequi, Peter H. Huber, and Yoany Vaillant) haven’t heard their sentences yet and have not pleaded guilty, so they will attempt to defend themselves in court. It will be interesting to see what happens there and what sentences those found guilty will get.

Finally, the DoJ has been holding onto user details for two years now, but no action against any of these pirates has been taken yet. At this point, and considering the delays to sentence the operators of the two platforms, we consider it highly unlikely that any action will be taken against even a sample of those users.